Chapter 36: Abstract Item

Interior Earth, expression.
Version.


You are important. You are special.
But you are not as important or special as you think you are. Your thoughts are your thoughts, and they are yours to own. Likewise, a pineapple's thoughts belong to that pineapple alone. We live in a strange place, with strange shapes and plenty of space. We live in a world; but a world is only a world. Let us try to understand by standing under our own ideas and looking at things from a new perspective.

The word "reality" could be defined as "the field in which we seem to live and move and have our being." And this seems to be both the field of thoughts and the field of physical reality. Thought occurs in a realm that cannot be explained, but it communicates directly with the physical realm (ie. observation, decision, memory, premeditated actions, emotional expressions, speech, etc).
For any one person, reality is an experience being represented by the mind. For this reason, we never see the "actual" world with our sensory perception; we are only able to see our mind's representation of it. Now it wouldn't be practical for a little human being to see the whole universe at once, so we are limited to our brain's capacity to represent it. The brain reduces the whole universe down to a pocket size version that we can fathom, using perspective to give one the illusion of oneself as an individual human being.
"If reality is the sum of all things, than it is not a thing. The sum of all things is not a thing for the same reason that the sum of all pianos is not a piano."

One factor that cannot be changed is the existence of existence itself. Existence must exist because nothing could exist without existence, and if we are to say anything about existence, we must admit that it exists. The second the word "existence" is uttered, we understand that it "exists."

Physical objects are interconnected by the laws of physics. I don't mean the "Laws of Physics" that humanity has defined and catalogued over the years; but the actual behavior of physical transaction. All physical manifestation is a combination of backgrounds and foregrounds, so technically the backgrounds could blend with the foregrounds and cancel itself away like a math problem; and there are actually idiots who believe that "fundamentally, nothing exists." However, the reality of physical manifestation may be demonstrated by ricocheting a tennis ball off of that person's forehead with considerable force. It may not "prove" anything, but it makes for a convincing argument.
As a human, you experience life through a semi-physical entity. I say "semi-physical" because the quality of being "physical" is based on nothing besides seeming to be physical. Really, a human is a vibration of energy, just like everything else. Scientists have more or less discovered that everything is energy, but they won't say it's "divine energy" just yet, because that would ruin our culture's cynical attitude about life in general. I'll just go ahead and say it: "Life is divine energy." ......I guess that makes me a hippie. I guess I'm being cynical about our culture's cynical attitude.
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(hastily scrawled notes of frantation)
Our bodies evolve from a chronological system of energy transferrence that has very little to do with chronological time as we understand it. The kind of chronology that energy follows seems to be more in line with what are called "aesthetics." What is commonly known as time has proven to be inconsequential to the actual business of life and energy. Time is an odd hallucination caused by the temporal nature of daily human attention.

The fact of your bodily existence is due to sexual reproduction in two previous SELVES.
Energetic, chronological and mental transfers of energy (ie. daily history and life as it really happens) caused these two people to meet, quite possibly (but not necessarily) to fall in love, and then followed the mysterious psychophysiobiological event of sexual reproduction. Whether your father raped your mother, or your mother raped your father, or anything inbetween; all humans are created out of sex, in one way or another. In fact all animals are brought into being via sexual reproduction, except for asexual creatures that reproduce all by themselves. All trees under the sun will cast shadows. But Earth isn't really "under" the sun in any sense other than size.

The Importance of What is Directly in front of you.
It is ancient, timeless, formless.
It has no quality whatsoever because infinity is the sum of all possible qualities.


Chapter 37: Translation

The First 2 Items from Lao Tzu's Tao-Te-Ching
reworked and configured by TOLTECH
(1)
The world as we understand it is not the world. It is only the world as we understand it.
The universe as we understand it is not the universe. It is only the universe as we understand it.
Whatever we say a thing is, it isn't (from Count Alfred Korzybski's "Law of Non-Identity")
Life and Reality are truly nameless and formless.
That which is named gives birth to an infinity of things

Freed from desire, anyone can know the Ultimate Truth
Should you "desire" to know the Truth, you will only find endless manifestations of the Truth (aka. shadows, illusions, maya, hallucinations, dreams, phantasms, )
Truly there is no difference between "Truth" or its manifestations
But seekers of Truth can be imprisoned by their thirst for Truth
They will never find it for the simple reason that there is no difference between the seeker and the sought. There is no difference whatsoever between the things we seek to understand and the things in us that seek to understand. (see also: A dog chasing its own tail)

This nameless and formless reality cannot be described
So Lao Tzu called it "Tao."


(2)
The self contrasts with the other
The known defines itself through the unknown
Yes harmonizes with No, Black and White suggest each other
What goes up must come down
People know 2 because they know -2, or 1 because they know 0

In the same way, being is realized because it directly opposes non-being
Existence is not non-existence.
Polar opposites contrast, distinguish, harmonize, imply and explain one another
There is no thing that does not have some thing as its opposite
If something can be defined by what it is, then also it can be defined by what it is not
Every action causes an equal and opposite reaction (from Sir Issac Newtown's "Third Law of Motion")

Opposite items occur in the presence of each other, the quality of opposition being the glue that holds them together.
Before and After are One. Chronological time is only a convincing illusion done with mirrors, but Eternity is equally unreal.

Apart from this and that, yin and yang....
Apart from all opposites; what is there?

A Zen master held up a staff and said: "If you call this a staff, you affirm. If you do not call it a staff, you deny. Beyond affirmation and negation, what is this?"

(The Remaining chapters have been omitted for added confusion)

see also:
The Seven Hermetic Principles
"The Nature of Polarity" by Alan W. Watts
Zen Koans (Small Anecdotes about the Nature of Reality and Enlightenment)